It is the conference where “artists meet scientists”, but it is at the same time an event where engineers meet engineers.

]]>http://geometryfactory.com/2012/07/siggraph-2012/feed/0SGP 2012 Software Awardhttp://geometryfactory.com/2012/07/sgp-2012-software-award/
http://geometryfactory.com/2012/07/sgp-2012-software-award/#commentsMon, 16 Jul 2012 20:31:52 +0000http://geometryfactory.com/?p=559Most authors of SGP or SIGGRAPH publications have to develop software as proof of concept and for qualitative and quantitative comparison with prior art. This software is often just a prototype that works on some data sets.

Sometimes software is mature enough to get distributed, so that others can reproduce results, check wether the algorithm works on their own real world data, and compare with another algorithm for the same problem, or another implementation of the same algorithm.

Only a small fraction of software gets developed with the ambition to produce “high quality” software.

GeometryFactory sponsors the SGP Software Award in order to encourage scientists to go the extra mile it takes to turn a research result into “high quality” software.

It takes an extra mile, as it means working on robustness so that the algorithm also works for degenerate or noisy input data, as it means cross-platform support, that is different compilers and third party software), as it means working on API design, as it means to write a documentation and test cases, as well as examples and tutorials, as it means dealing with users and bug reports, and reviewers in case the software is part of a library. It finally means a long term commitment as software needs maintenance.

All this is an effort we should not underestimate. We heavily profit from it as it allows to leverage on existing solutions when we work on new problems, inside as well as outside of the geometry processing community.

Besides fixes to existing packages major features where added in the following packages.

Linear Cell Complex (new package)

This package implements linear cell complexes, objects in d-dimension with linear geometry. The combinatorial part of objects is described by a combinatorial map, representing all the cells of the object plus the incidence and adjacency relations between cells. Geometry is added to combinatorial maps simply by associating a point to each vertex of the map. This data structure can be seen as the generalization in dD of the Polyhedron_3.